January 29, 2005

Darwinian metadata

The four pre-requisites for a Darwinian process are Reproduction, Variation, Inheritance and Selection. Let's say our individuals are tags and our species is a folksonomy:

Reproduction: Certainly. New tags are created with almost every entry, be that bookmark, article, or photo.

Variation: Absolutely.

Inheritance: Probably. When I copy a bookmark, I often copy the tags too.

Selection: Yep. 'Edit tag' was the first feature requested after we launched Connotea.

I think there's some mileage in this idea, but I'm not sure that individual=tag, species=folksonomy works perfectly. Then again, it's an analogy, let's not get too worked up about it. More importantly, "edit tag" isn't enough on the selection front. Tags need to die on a large scale, and that isn't happening. Nor is it obvious how it can happen without things that were tagged no longer being tagged, or old tags being ignored, which seems to lose too much value.